


天壤之别 : a world of difference

by overlord_xmh (okaytlyn)



Category: I.O.I (Band), PRISTIN (Band), Produce 101 (TV), SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Crack, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-06-02 06:06:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6553999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okaytlyn/pseuds/overlord_xmh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amidst their individual idiosyncrasies, here they are now, sitting in Seungcheol’s bedroom while the party rages outside, both of them oh-so out of place. Jieqiong shouldn't be in this room. Minghao shouldn't even be here.</p><p>[or: minghao and pinky take a walk down his embarrassing memory lane and he tries very hard to not fall for her obnoxious laughter]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the gravity that pulls me

**Author's Note:**

> zhou jieqiong is pinky's real name! and this was supposed to be a character study for minghao smh... /mess

Minghao is awkward; too long in the wrong places, bony arms and big doe eyes, a jarring discrepancy from whatever he’s like when performing. When people around him commit stupid shit, he’d send a sympathetic smile – later on, they’d coo about him being _such an angel_ – but truth be told, he just can’t mock others in sardonic Korean lingo, so he shuts up. This was in essence, Xu Minghao – awkward, unexpectedly snarky, and cynical.

And Jieqiong – she’s everything he isn’t. Sometimes she talks too much, too loudly, and she’d willingly be the butt of the joke, distorting her frankly, beautiful face, into meme imitations, just to salvage an awkward atmosphere. From drunken announcements at high school parties to turning her sophomore top-scorer award speech into a Saturday Night Live-esque jokefest, this was Jieqiong in a nutshell – kind, unexpectedly introspective, and loud.

 

Here they are now, sitting in Seungcheol’s bedroom while the party rages outside, both of them oh-so out of place. Jieqiong should be outside, taking body shots or something. Minghao should be in his dorm, mugging for the statistics exam he has tomorrow in the comfort of his room.

When Jieqiong closes the door and practically brings a speaker out of her orange backpack – where the _hell_ did that come from, who even brings a _backpack_ to a frat party -, Minghao throws himself onto the bed spread-eagled, and just laughs. He doesn’t know what’s so funny.

“What’s so funny,” Jieqiong frowns, digging into her bag yet again.

“You.” It’s muffled against the bedsheet.

“I’m funny?” she says, and he thinks he can hear an underlying pinch of insecurity, of self-doubt.

“You’re the joke.”

“I should have seen that coming. But you know what you should have seen coming?”

Minghao half braces for a lame joke that has to do with male ejaculation, burying himself further into the bed. He motions for her to continue.

“The fact that this is Seungcheol’s bed and do we know how many times he’s fucked Jeonghan here? Not that we can count, but you know, estimation is a thing.”

Minghao jolts up and immediately feels sorry for himself.

She laughs at him, and oh god, has anything ever sounded more obnoxious?

“So. I heard from Yebin and Seungkwan that you were gay in highschool? I don’t know, Seungkwan just said it and everyone started laughing,” Jieqiong smirks while scrolling through her playlists.

_Right, Seungkwan would totally bring that up. Not again._

“God, it was a joke…”

Jieqiong scoots closer and the bed squeaks.

“Spill the tea, Xu Minghao.”

 

 

Being surrounded with the same friends (clowns) didn’t really do much to help Minghao, you know, _to broaden his horizons_ in terms of new people he’d actually start talking to. His life is a string of blurry embarrassment that’s impossible to expand on in jilted Korean.

When he was eighteen, his high school friends were in the “sexuality experimentation” phase, which had included most of them hooking up and doing stupid, regrettable shit together – some of which had worked out (for at least a decent few months) and for the greater part, had failed spectacularly. Of course, they like to remember the good times, and Hansol and Seungkwan’s still strong relationship is a nice testament of time. (Or rather, they were the only people that got out of the phase unscathed).

Jeonghan tried going straight, and it ended in multiple girls facing insecurity issues with their own bodies after various one night stands – a comical, yet tragic tale of your modern-day Adonis. Minghao thinks Jeonghan should have totally stuck to just Seungcheol; the whole event only boosted Jeonghan’s pre-inflated ego, and the rest of them had to put up with him whining about how “flawlessness is such a crime!” for the next two months.

Soonyoung had kissed Seokmin in between a game of WWE on xBox, which led to both of them feeling angsty and confused, which then dragged on to another few weeks of hide and seek. Honestly, it was the most trying of times, being mediators to their pathetic “no-homo” act. Eventually, they had sex, and they broke up, and now they’re awkward. They could have had it all.

He remembers Soonyoung telling him during dance practice about how his life feels like a highly emotional Korean drama. To which, Minghao replied: “Tragic.”

Junhui and Jisoo, thankfully, had kept to themselves because well, they were nerds then. (But Minghao knows Jisoo doesn’t have the _chill_ he claims to have, not when he heard him praying ardently to Jesus at night for Jeonghan to “wake the fuck up” and go back to Seungcheol so that Jisoo doesn’t need to hear Seungcheol crying in his dorm.)

 

_(“Wait…” Jieqiong breaks into Minghao’s monologue of sorts. “You talk this much? When you’re not using Korean-”_

_“Shut up,” he snaps. “I was getting to the climax.”)_

 

A few days later, Minghao made the unfortunate mistake of going for Mingyu’s football finals with Seungkwan.

 

_(“Why is it a mistake? Is this where you go gay for Mingyu?”_

_Minghao puts a finger to Jieqiong’s lips to silence her, like he always does with Junhui when he talks too much, but her lips are soft against the callouses of his fingers and it makes him do a double take. Just for a bit.)_

 

Mingyu was great on the field and Minghao had profoundly felt that wow, _for the first time I understand why people say gross booger master Kim Mingyu is attractive._ So, reasonably, he had to give credit where credit was due.

Seungkwan, with his snapchat open, had yelled into the phone about the game, panning around and landing on Minghao.

“HOW DO YOU FIND MINGYU SO FAR?”

At that moment, he was caught off-guard. “UHM HE’S HOT!”

Seungkwan had been silent for a second, then broke out into a shit eating grin, hugging Minghao with tears in his eyes and muttering, “the day has finally, thank the Lord almighty!”

The next morning, he wakes up to Seungkwan’s viral snapchat with a caption that reads “MINGHAO FINALLY CAME OUT! #jointheclub!”

_(Jieqiong is already tearing at the sides as she struggles to stay in an upright, cross-legged position. Minghao’s lying down next to her, grimacing as he relives high school all over again.)_

Minghao had resolved to ignore Seungkwan’s shenanigans and had gone straight to the library to mug at his usual place – but in his place, Mingyu was snoring, and wow.

_(“I scraped the chair against the floor to wake him up so I could explain, but the next thing I knew, the library doors slammed open and six people came in with a cake, yelling the lyrics to “Congratulations”._

_“Congratulations for what?”_

_“For coming out, apparently. Seungkwan, Hansol, Seungcheol, Jeonghan, Soonyoung, and Seokmin were there and in front of the whole congregation of poor students that came to the library to seek silent solace, they announced my inauguration into their Rainbow Club.”_

_“Oh, lovely.”)_

But Minghao was chill, and even though he was panicking on the inside, he had calmly eaten his slice of cake and shoved them all out of the library in view of general respect.

 

“So, that’s the end?” Jieqiong pouts.

“It gets worse as it goes on. Essentially, I didn't mind at first and dated Mingyu for like three days and then I realised – do I want a dick up my ass? Do I want to see Mingyu’s face first thing in the morning? Does all my friends being gay mean that I am? So I pondered.”

“No one’s expecting you to be philosophical, Minghao. You could have just said you were straight.”

“Their general line of argument was that spaghetti is straight until it’s heated up so I wasn’t going to go up against that. Plus, “ Minghao feels his cheeks heat up and oh, he might as well say this, “I was just fucking confused and too much of a pussy.”

“Deep.”

Jieqiong throws her head back and guffaws again. It scares Minghao when a nagging part of his brain goes like, “oh, I could get used to her laughter”, because firstly, Jieqiong is out of his league, and secondly, they semi-ditched a party to study for a test in Seungcheol’s room (of all places) so non-platonic feelings are clearly out of the question.

Thirdly, Minghao practically told her about his past lifestyle as a wuss. He can bid goodbye to his image as “mysterious wushu stuntman in the hiphop team”.

 

“Jieqiong, may I kindly remind you that we came to mug like the exemplary students we are? _So yeah,_  commercial break over, I don’t do romance.”

She rolls her eyes and brings out the set of lecture notes and they pore over it for an hour.

 

(The hour involves a whole lot of self-conscious laughter, fleeting stares and shoulder to shoulder touching, but it’s not like they’ll do anything about it, really.)

 

Later, the door bursts open and Seungcheol’s face is around the corner, on the verge of exasperation.

“I swear Minghao if you and Jieqiong soiled my sheets- oh, you’re studying.”

“Yeah, I kinda realised that uni _was_ about studying?”

Seungcheol drags a half-sober (or half-drunk? It’s all in the mind) Jeonghan into the room and coos about how Minghao and Jieqiong are such good kids.

Jeonghan looks like he’s deciding between kissing Seungcheol or throwing up all over the carpet, and they take this as the cue to leave.

 

 

 

There’s more people than expected and he loses Jieqiong in the throng of bodies. Minghao sort of hopes she’d leave the party with him so that they can study more and shit-talk about others in quiet privacy. But then, he sees her standing on top of the dining table with a makeshift mic in her hand, playfully pushing away a few guys, laughing once more  - and now it has gone from sounding like toads burping to some kind of unattainable heavenly melody to his ears – and this is when it hits him.

 

It’s not a pointed arrow to his heart or like a strong punch to his gut – it’s knowing that reality sucks, and he has to get his shit together.

Xu Minghao and Zhou Jieqiong are from two different worlds, and it feels kind of bittersweet but well. It’s a lot less angstier than it seems. People come and go.

 

He’ll be fine.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> redbull isn't healthy, minghao thinks as he drinks from his tumbler, but neither is staring into the sun, and, oh, how jieqiong glows as she sits across him, poring over notes and looking up to check if he's mind's still somewhere in the stratosphere and not in outer space.

After the stats test, Minghao turns in his paper and has somewhat of a skip in in his steps as he heads towards the door. He’s pretty sure he aced it this time.

It’s okay that he got home early to study last night and spent his time alone in the dorm while Mingyu stayed out. Dealing with Mingyu’s drunk gargantuan ass at 3 am when Wonwoo dumped him there at their doorstep also helped him take his mind of someone with sparkly eyes and ugly laughter-

“Oh, hey! How was the test, man. Did the mugging do you good?” Jieqiong pokes his elbow when he turns a corner. He almost trips at the action, and Mingyu side-eyes Minghao at his jitteriness.

“I, uh, I think I did alright. You?” Minghao, of course, is not nervous. Not shocked that she came to grace his presence once more. Minghao is Perfectly Fine, with a capital P and F and he hopes Mingyu doesn’t catch the sliver of childish hope in his voice.

Jieqiong pulls out her hair tie and re-does her hair, locks splaying over her back in black waves and it kind of smells like oranges and cream and meringues. She cocks her head in an unsure grin. “I dunno, actually. The second last question was the like exact same thing we went through last night, you know that permutation question about javelin trajectory and stuff.”

“Right, I remember. But, uh, how long did you stay last night?”

Her friend, Kang Yebin from Aerospace Studies slings and arm around Jieqiong’s shoulders. “Oh, we probably left around 2. Wonwoo took us home.”

“Jeon Wonwoo? Third year Architecture major?”

“You jealous?” Mingyu teases, pulling Minghao’s hood over him and the latter scowls. “When did you even start hanging out with someone like Jieqiong anyway?”

“Jeez, I’m not that great-“ and “Last night,”, Jieqiong and Minghao respond at the same time, and Junhui, coming out from nowhere, smirks, muttering:“哇， 你们好有默契哦~”

“Last night? What did you guys-” Mingyu questions incredulously, and now Jieqiong’s horde of friends from track and field surround them; everything’s so, so messy. Jieqiong’s slapping Junhui for the comment, Mingyu’s asking him to translate Junhui’s remark, and Yebin’s just attracting a whole lot of people fazed by the commotion surrounding Zhou Jieqiong.

 _This is the price of fame, I guess,_ Minghao thinks and effectively slips out of the crowd like he can, like he always does. It was getting a little suffocating, anyway.

 

Jieqiong has a little trouble finding him at the library later but she swings by and dumps her criminally thick textbook on Asian Archaeology and a stack of papers to file on the table.

Minghao’s head snaps up so fast that he gets whiplash. Rubbing at his sore neck, he smiles sheepishly and waves.

“What are you doing here?”

“I was thinking, we’re pretty productive huh? Like, together. I get easily distracted and there’s a test coming up. Wait, I forgot to ask, can I sit here?” Jieqiong beams hopefully and MInghao has to look down to fight the smile on his face and stares at her text. _You can’t look at the sun for too long when it’s too dazzling for the mere human eye._

“Sure, but I don’t take archaeology?” He shrugs in an attempt to seem nonchalant. Jieqiong is already making herself at home, setting down her pencil case and her value pack of ten highlighters from Taobao, unfurling the pages and popping a stick of gum into her mouth.

“Yeah, but you help me focus.”

“Is that a compliment or is it a nicer way to say I’m boring?” Minghao asks softly, trying hard to mask the self-consciousness in his voice.

She laughs soundlessly, shaking her head and pointing semi-sternly to his set of equations to steer him back to work.

 

Hours pass and Minghao’s almost through with his assignment when a loud thud jolts him out of a reverie involving calculus and angsty Mayday(五月天) songs.

Jieqiong whimpers across him and rubs her forehead in agony. _Oh._

“I fell asleep,” she whines, “I whacked my head against the hole puncher, _fuck_ my life.”

Minghao has half the mind to laugh at her stupidity and to kiss the blooming bruise on her forehead but thinks against both, taking her hand in his and dragging her to the cafeteria.

“Hey, I haven’t done enough work to warrant myself a break!” Jieqiong calls after him as they run downstairs.

“You’re too tired, did you think you’d be more productive like this? At this rate you’re going to punch a hole into your own skull.” He scoffs and pants, expression souring at the long queue congregating at the café.

Jieqiong tugs on the sleeve of his hoodie to tear him away. “I don’t drink the fancy stuff anyway. Do you?”

He shurgs. “I thought you would drink like, lattes and frappes with names longer than the Great Wall of China, so I’m here.”

“Wait, I’ll go get something from my locker. You find a seat or somewhere to stand and look cool. Take five.” Jieqiong says hurriedly and leaves.

_Wow, she runs fast. I mean she’s in track but. Wow._

Jieqiong comes back panting with two Redbull cans in hand, stopping by the café to plead for two cups of ice.

“I’ve got a bruise, see?” she points to her forehead, eyes begging the drinks guy for two cups of ice, “So I need, like, a lot of ice. Please help the less fortunate!”

The guy laughs and pats her head, willingly scooping it out of the ice-bin.

“What are you doing?” Minghao scratches his head as the Sun heads towards his direction with cups of ice, melting everything but the ice in her path.

“We’re going to put cold Redbull in our opaque tumblers. Saves time, and it’s longer lasting.”

“It’s not the healthiest thing-“ Minghao tries, but he gives in anyway because he’s a culprit of Redbull addiction as well. He just didn’t expect, well, Zhou Jieqiong to be one as well.

 

In the midst of pouring, a rogue thought of “Jieqiong is kinda cool” enters his mind space even through his carefully crafted layers of osmosis to stem feelings of any kind. He shakes his head rapidly – as if it’d get rid of his thoughts, and it just ends up in him looking really stupid in front of her when they get back to their seats.

“Why are you like head-banging like a puppy drying itself after bathing,” Jieqiong peers at him.

He doesn’t know what to say, so he shrugs. Minghao realises that he’s shrugging a whole lot today, but maybe that’s still better than saying the wrong thing.

 

 

The sky is an array of lilac hues over a canvas of crimson, and it’s that moment where the sun’s going to set but not just yet. It’s probably one of his first times watching the sun, as someone that doesn’t really care for nature or aesthetics anyway.

_Maybe it still pales in comparison to the sun that’s skipping next to me, waving to everyone she sees, like she knows how she brightens everyone’s day._

“Why are you doing this with me, anyway,” Minghao wonders as they walk out of the library, towards the lecture halls. Next to the sun, he’s just a ripple of a cloud, billowing away from her as he basks in her temporal illumination.

“My friends like running and sex, which is great, I mean, they de-stress, but I can’t really do productive things with them?” Jieqiong peers into the sky like it’s glistening, actually giving the question thought, which is ironic, really, because _she’s_ the one shimmering in his peripheral vision.

“I guess they could do _re­_ -productive things though.”

The pun clicks immediately within her, and that’s how things work anyway, when you’re a pun-master yourself. She holds out a hand for him to high-five it, but Minghao’s too slow to get the memo, eyes wide in question.

Sheepishly, Jieqiong retracts her hand, pouting. “Ah, that didn’t really warrant a high-five, sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Minghao playfully shoves her shoulder. “Hey, I’m supposed to be the awkward one here. You’re the people person, you’re the valedictorian. You’re Zhou Jieqiong. I’m blurry at the edges.”

She giggles, stringing together an aubade of her own. “Hi, Blurry at the edges. Your dance moves however, are sharp, and so is your tongue. And your brain during exams.”

“Hey, I’m super polite, what are you saying?” He smirks.

 

 

Jieqiong’s steps come to a halt outside Lecture Hall 241 and tiptoes to peek into the door window to check if her professor’s in yet. “I guess it works though,” she mutters, words barely audible as they slip between her lips.

“What works? The door?” Minghao questions.

“No, us.” Jieqiong gestures casually towards him and his laptop in his arms. “Two over-achieving Chinese college students living on caffeine. I don’t think Yebin or Mingyu is fond of mugging together either so, yup.”

_Minghao leans against the wall, watching her as a simper of self-consciousness passes over her face, then a grin that lights up the whole room._

“Ah, my professor’s coming. I can hear him.”

_The sound of ‘old man shoes’ trail from the other end of the doorway, and he senses this as the time to part. It’s today’s curtain call, and once again, they’ll be strangers._

Jieqiong pushes over the door, but before she heads in, before he turns on his heels, she calls his name; hurriedly, unsurely, but with every tinge of hope laced in a seven-lettered name.

_… Or not._

“Hmm?” he swivels around at a speed that almost earns his second encounter of the day with whiplash.

“We, we should do this more often, yeah?”

And Xu Minghao, the pixie-faced, elf-eared Dark Lord of the East, the guy who gives approximately gives zero to zero point one fucks a day, who had sworn to be a celibate till he graduated and had time and money to blow, breaks into a stupid grin that might tear his face apart.

Slowly, surely, but nonetheless with every tinge of hope laced in a three-worded sentence, he replies. “Yeah, we should.”

Jieqiong’s orbs are smiling back at him when she swivels with a wave and disappears into the hall.

_And maybe, two worlds can collide._

 

 

As Minghao strolls back to the dorms, watching the sky transform with new-found awe, he remembers crinkly eyes and bruised foreheads. And he thinks, as the day breaks before his eyes, that today’s sunset was the most beautiful one he’s seen.


End file.
